Stupidity (or how do you make a bad situation ten times worse? Ask us here in the ‘developed’ West. We can give you chapter and verse, whether you like it or not)

There is a good case to be made that one can forgive most things except stupidity. Actually, there are one or two other things which one feels disinclined to forgive, a lack of charity being one, so that’s me set to be pilloried for another unforgivable trait, hypocrisy. But leave that for another time. Let me here ramble on about stupidity on a grand scale.

The overnight news is the action by the Egyptian army to clear one or two protest camps set up by protesters who support the ousted president Morsi and can’t, for the life of them, see the right in a democratically elected head of state being toppled. Between 150 and 2,000 folk are said to have died in the attacks by soldiers. That’s at least 150 too many.

Well, you might tell yourself from the comfort of your armchair, worse things have happened at sea, and, anyway, isn’t such violence quite commonplace in what is still regarded by many as the ‘underdeveloped world’? Good Lord, you might think, just the other day several hundred people were killed in Somalia, Syria, Brazil, Nigeria and other such insalubrious places. Surely it’s a way of life out there? Surely they rather expect to come home to find that dad, or their brother or their sister was in the wrong place at the wrong time and won’t be coming home tonight or, for that matter, for ever?

Perhaps you think I’m joking, but there are quite a few here in the ‘developed’ West, where a ‘tragedy’ is their flight being delayed by several hours and they didn’t get to summer holiday resort until a day after they were supposed to get there, who think just along such lines. I was once told, years ago, in all seriousness, that famine in East Africa wasn’t as bad for the East Africans as it was for us because ‘they were used to that kind of thing’. In a sense, what happened in Egypt yesterday was commonplace. Change channels and you can hear reports from Syria where equally horrible things are taking place.

What caught my attention was a report from Cairo on BBC radio news in which several Morsi supporters were interviewed. In broken English - it’s astonishing in this day and age how little English some chaps have - they vented their fury at Britain, the U.S. and the smug rest of them over their supine reaction to the toppling of Morsi a month ago and how there had not been a peep of protest at what was to any honest eyes an out-an-out coup.

One of them screamed - you rarely hear us here in the ‘developed’ West screaming, oh no, the most we might do is raise our voices a little, but then different strokes . . . - that we in the West had been lecturing the Arab states about how they must embrace democracy, but that when they did as they were bid and elected Morsi, there was rather a lot of muted tut-tutting. ‘When we said that your leader should be democratically elected, we didn’t actually mean that you should democratically elect a chap who would very much like his country to be run along more Islamic

Here’s a chap who will probably think twice the next time the West urges him to act democratically. ‘Is there,’ he’ll ask himself, ‘really that much point?’
principles, don’t you know.’ Then when the chap a majority of Egyptians did elect - and I’ll repeat, I have yet to hear anyone claim that the election last year was in any way rigged or otherwise unfair - was removed from power by an unholy alliance of the army and assorted metropolitans liberals, the silence of the West who are usually none too slow in condemning a military coup was deafening. You rather feel the guy’s frustration. And it doesn’t bode well for other Arab states taking the West seriously when we decided to lecture them, too.

It didn’t even seem to bother the us here in the West that Morsi was placed under house arrest and that a large number of Muslim Brotherhood members were locked up without charge. Not a peep of protest was heard from London, Washington, Paris or Berlin, let along Rome, Copenhagen, The Hague or Madrid. That was the first act of Western stupidity. It was, in fact, a lot more than just criminally stupid, but here I’ll just deal with the rancid, breathtaking stupidity.

Large numbers of Morsi supporters then set up their protest camps - a concept of a protest camp not unfamiliar here in the ‘developed’ West, and demanded that their man should be released and that the new government and the army should respect the results of last year’s election. Nothing much wrong with that, you might agree (that is if your armchair isn’t now far more comfortable and you’d far prefer to switch on

No, not Spain in 1936, but Egypt in 2013   the TV and watch Masterchef or Escape To The Country). But the Egyptian army did disagree, and yesterday they demonstrated how much they disagreed. Now, of course, the West is outraged as only the West can get outraged, and has been tut-tutting far into the night about it all. It’s wholly unacceptable, don’t you know. But, dear friends, the genie is out of the bottle.

Anyone who believes that the situation Egypt can somehow be resolved peacefully is living in cloud-cuckoo land. Among a great many of those who supported Morsi are those who have now had it with democracy, and when they are told that democracy is incompatible with the kind of state they would like to live in, one in which sharia law is observed rather more to the letter, they are inclined to tell us: OK, stuff democracy. But it needn’t have got to this stage. If only when the original coup took place the West had put its money where its mouth is and said ‘now hold on, chaps, this man Morsi was elected fair and square and you can’t just dump him like that, we would, at least, still have one leg to stand on. Now we have none.

. . .

The original charges against Morsi included that despite his promises to rule ‘for all the country’ he did nothing of the kind and merely promoted the ambitions of the Muslim Brotherhood, and that he did absolutely fuck-all to improve the conditions of anyone. Well, that might well be true. And it might well be a load of cobblers. How can I tell? But in many countries of the ‘developed’ West similar charges are being made against an elected government.

Here in Britain the Left daily makes claims that the ‘Tory cuts’ are ‘costing lives’. So how come we don’t have a coup to get rid of Cameron? We don’t because it would be undemocratic. Which begs the question: if water is wet in Britain, is it not equally wet in Egypt? Apparently not. But now we have the mess. With exquisite timing the U.S. for what seems like the umpteenth time, has once again persuaded Israel and the various Palestinian factions to sit down and try to hammer out some kind of modus vivendi which will lead to a more peaceful, less unpleasant life all round.

Given that the Yanks didn’t come up with the idea last Friday and will have been painstakingly planning this for several months, didn’t it occur to any of the wise herberts in the State Department that giving the Egyptian army a wink and a nod to go ahead and launch a coup - for that is practically what the West’s supine attitude to the events boils down to - would go down like a pork sandwich at those Jewish/Muslim peace talks, especially from the Palestinian perspective? Apparently not.

As I say, one can forgive much except rank stupidity.

Wagner gets a Brownie point, Tchaikovsky gets a load more, Brahms – well, who was Brahms except, apparently, the third B? - and me, well I’m still wondering just how English I am

It’s was off to St Endellion last night for the penultimate concert of the St Endellion Summer Festival with the aunt with whom I stay when I bugger off to Bordeaux for concerts. On the bill - ‘bill’ sounds horribly plebeian for an evening of 19th-century classical music, and on reflection I should probably use the far more respectable ‘programme’, but I’m in a contrary mood, so ‘bill’ it will remain, and at the end of the day both mean the same thing and are only distinguished by snobbery and attitude - were Brahms, Wagner and Tchaikovsky.

 Of Brahms, who I understand is regarded as the third B in the Three Bs, the two others being Bach and Beethoven, I haven’t actually heard very much, but I must say what I heard yesterday, Gesang der Parzen (and I, too, had to look up ‘Parzen’), was very much to my taste. (As for Brahms being the third B, I must admit that I can’t quite see it, but that is probably because, as I say, I haven’t heard a great deal of his music, but that also because for me a little 19th-century romanticism goes quite a long way).

Next came the Wagner, and I was intrigued. The flip thing for me to write here (and being about as deep as a saucer of water I really cannot resist writing it) is that I haven’t heard a lot of Wagner because I just haven’t got the time. My other quip, used here once before but as the man said ‘if they liked it once, they’ll like it twice, is that Wagner became very affluent in his later years because he was the first composer to insist on being paid by the hour. In short, Wagner doesn’t grab me very much at all. Beecham once said (I think it was Beecham) that ‘Wagner has his moments, about one every 15 minutes’, and that sums it up rather well.

When you go to hear and see a Wagner opera, you are well advised to take a change of clothes and leave a forwarding address. Apart from that the chap, as far as I am concerned, more or less invented bombast, which is perhaps why he went down a storm with the National Socialists and, more recently, the Americans. But I was intrigued, for the bill (aka programme) didn’t promise two days of Germanic sword and sorcery but Lieder, to be more precise, the Wesendonck Lieder, five of them. And, dear reader, I liked them.

I had previously heard musicologists being rather positive about Wagner, about how he was a innovator and, as one said recently, was (something along the lines of) the interface between classical music and modernism. Well, I know next to nothing about music in that deeper, technical sense, but is seems Wagner came up with chords and harmonies which were quite startling to then contemporary ears. But being a crypto-liberal despite my reactionary pose I was prepared to give good ’ole Richard the benefit of doubt. And I’m pleased to say he came up trumps, with his Lieder having sometimes a delicacy I never suspected the old sod was capable off.

After the interval (and £3 glass of bloody awful red plonk my aunt and I had to share because neither of us had brought enough dosh with us to buy two - I had had £8 on me, she had nothing, and I had previously blown £5 of those £8 on a glossy programme. It’s a measure of how much the St Endellion Festival has embraced the 21st century that in days gone by you had to put up with a blackboard with that night’s bill chalked up on it in rather illegible handwriting. One year they did experiment with a chap all togged up as an ‘olde worlde’ town cryer, including bell, who spent an hour or so walking around the church announcing that night’s programme, but it didn’t go down well with the more refined sort who thought it all a bit infra-dig) came Tchaikovsky’s Fourth Symphony, and very glad I am, too, that I heard it in live performance.

Many, many, many folk are horribly sniffy about Tchaikovsky but I can’t see why and it is nothing but a bad reflection on them. Years ago when I was living in Berlin and attending a German school, I would arrive home at just before 2pm, have my lunch and then go upstairs to do my homework and tune into AFN to Don Ameche’s Pop Concert whose theme tune was Tchaikosky First Piano Concerto, and if that isn’t enough to turn most 11/12 year-old lads onto classical music, I don’t know what is. I still like it, and get beyond those crashing opening chords it does get very moving.

The opening bars of the Fourth Symphony are, I’m sure, pretty familiar to many, rather like the faces of actors we have seen in many a film but can’t quite place. Well, yesterday I placed it and listened to the lot. Because I had booked late and there were few tickets still available, we sat at the side of St Endellion parish church right next to the orchestra. I was - literally (yes, Pete, literally, about a foot and a half from the string section (or at least the outer reaches of the string section) and it was great. Perhaps the balance of instruments wasn’t what it might have been - the French horns, who play quite a prominent part in the opening, were barely ten feet away and loud - but it was a revelation, for example, to hear how the strings interacted. And that third movement, the ‘pizzicato’ movement. It should persuade anyone with a soul that for all his angst and troubles - Tchaikovsky never came to terms with being gay and drank far too much - the lad was basically good-hearted, good-natured and would surely have been good company. I like to think that laughing came to him rather easily, and I don’t mean laughing in a spiteful way. It is no surprise to me that he got on well with his brothers and inspired affection in his friends. He’s the kind of guy - make that gay - whose real tragedy, one he shares with Oscar Wilde, was that he wasn’t born 150 years later when his sexuality would have been of no consequence.

. . .

Just before writing this entry, I looked up (inevitably on Wikipedia) further details of Wagner’s life, and where I like to think I should very much have enjoyed Tchaikovsky’s company, Richard, despite my rather grudging praise above, was what we call in the trade ‘a cunt’. Make that self-centred cunt. There is this curious belief that ‘the artist’ has to be a bastard to be good. Well, bollocks to that. Certainly, an ‘artist’ must be single-minded where his work is concerned, but when it comes to the rest of his or her life where being just an ordinary Joe or Jane is concerned he and she are just like the rest of us and are obliged to treat the rest of us with respect. Wagner, it seems, didn’t. I’m not going to go into his anti-semitism because for the purpose of what I want to say that is not pertinent (in as far as there are just as many Jewish cunts as there are Gentile cunts). When he was still an aspiring composer Giacomo Meyerbier, which should really just be Meyer Bier as the Giacomo was assumed for professional reasons, championed him. In return Wagner later shat on Meyer Bier.

He hitched up with Minna Planer and treated her like dirt, putting his own career well before hers, though I rather suspect she was just as much a pain in the arse as he was. I like the story when, after many rows and many partings, they finally got married, they even had a stant-up row in front of the minister who was about to marry them. Later, patronised, in the best sense, by a businessman Otto von Wesendonck, he went on (if some are to be believed) to have an affair with the chaps wife. Then there’s the flight from Riga across the Russian border with Minna and her daughter Nathalie, the horrendous trip to London, the years of poverty in Paris, the participation in the Dresden revolution and what came later and it seems to me Wagner had a life crying out to be made into a - good, that’s important - mini series. If it wasn’t for the hours and hours and hours of bombastic music. But I must say I’m glad I discovered the Wesendonck Lieder.

. . .

One last point. If anyone wanted to capture the essence of a certain kind of English middle-class life, visit a St Endellion festival. Very few of the fok there are under 40, most of over 50 and many over 60, almost all have grey or white hair and beards, including many of the women, and most of the cars are quite young. I hate to be snooty (well, actually, I don’t, I like it) but it is everything Labour hate. I, too, now have white hair and at the moment a very trimmed beard, but I still feel like an outsider.

Last night I was wondering why, and I came up with this explanation: I was born in Britain to an English father and a German mother, but more or less brought up as a German child, even wearing Lederhosen at primary school, which was quite something in the early Fifties, just eight or nine years after World War II ended. Then, in 1959, we move to Berlin where I attended German schools, but again felt like an outsider, the English kid who spoke perfect German (though sadly no more) and, as all kids do at that age, wanted to be like everyone else. Then it was back to England, to boarding school, where again I felt the outsider (my nicknames were first Preggers, because I wasn’t the slimmest, then Kraut and Jackboots). In time, of course, as we all do, or all of us try to do, in my case reasonably successfully, I made a virtue out of a vice and began to celebrate being an outsider.

So at St Endellion I might well have resembled the masses, but I still looked on. And feel able to make rather condescending comments about it all now. For the record, I don’t feel ‘English’, but nor do I feel ‘German’. I speak English without an accent and, given a few weeks in Germany to get back in swing, I would speak German like a German in that Germans would think me German. But what I am, Lord knows. My younger brother, now 55, can’t remember Germany, but was brought up in France from the age of seven to 12. My sister, who was also brought up in France, married a German when she was 22 and has, more or less, lived there ever since. I don’t know how either feels. My older brother is mentally ill, probably schizophrenic, so what he feels will depend on the day you talk to him. He also watches an awful lot of bollocks TV but is twice as bright as me. Make of that what you will.

In which I drop the pose and ask: Marriage? Is your’s pretty shitty too? Read on

I have sometimes complained in the past that in this ’ere blog I have painted myself into a corner, that after I started it as a kind of digital update to my ‘written diary’ - which, as I said was as much a commonplace book as a diary - it became, not rather quickly, just another platform for just another pub bore to sound off. It is now less of a ‘diary’ and far, far more of just another cunt sounding off. And why do I feel I have painted myself into a corner? Because I am no longer writing ‘for myself’.

It’s quite simple: whereas, to my almost certain knowledge, no one, but no one, ever read the diary, this blog is, according to ‘the stats’ read - or rather individual entries are read - by about 30 folk a day. So where before I was able, in private, to let it all hang out, to bemoan my lot, to rant and rave about the fortune life had decided to give me, now I am far more inhibited. Here everything I say is public, but how could anyone have been able to read my previous private diary? Unless someone had broken into my home and decided to make a point of searching out out a diary rather than making off - in that quaint phrase still used by newspapers, although only by newspapers - with whatever goodies and chattels they might come across, my diary would have forever remained unread. Good Lord, even I didn’t bother reading it after a particular itch had been thoroughly scratched.

On the other hand, and ironically, a blog such as this can be - and is, in fact, according to the statistics - read, by complete strangers the world over, many of whom, I’m certain, are quite content with browsing through my ramblings and have no intention whatsoever of taking any interest in my woes, let along stealing anything from me. In fact, even if they did decide to rob me blind, such an enterprise would, logistically, be not just difficult, but pretty bloody pointless. The vast majority of those who tune in live several thousand miles away: in Russia - increasingly, which is something of a mystery to me, but quite gratifying - in the United States, in the ‘Far East’ (a quaint concept that the ‘Far East’: do our cousins in Indonesia, China and Japan see us as her in the smug Western World as the ‘Far West’? I rather doubt it. I rather suspect they increasingly don’t really give a shit about what we here in the ‘Far West’ are up to).

So even if some reader or other in Turkey or India or South Africa or wherever they lay their heads at night did wake up one morning, find they had nothing better to do for a while and did tell themselves: ‘That chap whose blog I sometimes read, I wonder whether he’s got anything worth nicking?’ would they really follow it through? Answers, please, on the customary postcard. Ever so often - as now - I do rather wish that this were more of the ‘private diary’ I once kept and that I could speak personally. I do rather wish I could moan. But I am inhibited: who, except for perhaps the morons who are all so keen to perform on prime-time TV with several million watching, is all that keen to bare their soul? Not me. I am the private kind.

The point is that because my ‘private diary’ would never be read by anyone, I could step out from behind the disguise, facade, call it what you will, and record what was on my mind, what was upsetting me. Here, in this blog, I have never really felt I cold. But now I will. I have in past entries hinted that my marriage is not the best. It is not the happiest. In the best world of all possible worlds I would have hoped for better. But I also know that no marriage, and I stress ‘no marriage’ is ever trouble-free. But in a good marriage I suspect there is willing, their is a desire to improve things. That, sadly, is not unilaterally the case in my marriage.

I am, of course, very, very aware, that there are two sides to every coin, that should my wife also be writing a blog, she would quite possibly give a slightly different account of our troubles. Let me put it this way: I am not ‘a Christian’ but I do believe that what Christ said, or what he is reported to have said, is often quite wise. And one of his observations is that - I am obliged to paraphrase - we should be rather less critical of the mote in the other’s eye and rather more aware of the beam in our own eye, because all too often we are not. So please bear that in mind when you read what follows, and please bear in mind that I am very aware that I am no saint.

My wife - how do I put this? - more or less treats me as a stranger. I am, more or less invisible to her. And that’s how she likes it. She doesn’t want to know any more. She doesn’t talk to me. She discusses nothing. To sum up: we don’t have a marriage in more or less every sense of the word.

I have described, in past entries, how our marriage came about, and it was not - on my part at least - the most romantic of couplings. I discovered after we were married that long before we got to know each other, though after she had first set eyes on my, she had developed a crush on me. The trouble was that, as is almost always the case, what she imagined would come true was nothing like what did come true. The problem was, and is, that she is utterly inflexible and has been unable to adapt.

You, who is reading this, don’t know me. You don’t know my wife. All you have to go on is what I record here, but I must ask you to believe me, to trust me. I have my faults, as we all do, but I also have my virtues. I am usually quite easygoing. Yes, I can lose my rag, and, yes, I have a sharp tongue and, yes, I can be ratty. But at the end of the day I like to get on with people, I will compromise, I will make allowances, I will give way, I will start again, I won’t hold a grudge, if for no other reason that it helps to make life easier and more pleasant all round. Quite simply I like life to proceed as smoothly as possible.

My wife is - and I remind you again that this is my account, not hers, so at least be aware that I am aware of that - is more or less the opposite. To put it prosaically, choose to regard a glass as half full, she far prefers to see it as half empty: perhaps that will make some sense to you reading this. A few years ago her father fell out with his daughter-in-law and - I almost wrote ‘in a very Cornish way’ but, in fact, such thing happenings are universal - what I can only describe as a family feud developed and my wife cut her father out of her life and chose to side with her sister-in-law. He, too, became a non-person. I was astounded at her attitude. There was no compromise, no meeting halfway, nothing. The odd thing was that it wasn’t even her fight. It was just that she had aligned herself with the side he wasn’t on. Something similar has happened to me.

Whereas I was once, from afar, the apple of her eye, I am now a zero. As far as I can see my one role in her life is to pay the household bills, no more. I have, every so often, tried to discuss it with her, but that was never successful. I don’t deny that I have said some hurtful things - I have already admitted that I can have a sharp tongue - but then so has she. I shall try to describe her objectively to, perhaps, give you a fuller picture.

She is not stupid, but she is not the brightest, either, in the sense that some people have an ability to evaluate situations and see them from a variety of points of view. She can’t, or, at least, doesn’t seem to want to see anything through the other’s eyes. She is very confident in her own narrow world, supremely confident, in fact; but outside that extremely narrow world she goes to pieces. Put her in a situation in which she is unfamiliar or at a loss and she goes to pieces. People like that can, I think, develop in two ways: some become timid and cower, afraid of what might happen next. Others, and I think she is one, prefer to keep an iron grip on everything to ensure that nothing changes. She wants to make every decision to that she is certain of what is what and will have no discussion on any matter. It so happens that I - and I must again remind you that this is my account, that I am describing the mote in her eye and am quite possibly utterly unaware of the beam in mine - will choose to give way to keep the peace. I can’t pretend that situations don’t rankle, but I also really don’t want - for my own sake as much as anyone else’s - to live in a perpetually poisonous atmosphere.

. . .

This is pretty irrelevant (even though I haven’t had sex in 14 years - an invitation, girls or what!) but I have always liked these seaside pictures, both Donald McGill and Bamford.

This one is a Bamford. And if you like that one, here’s a few more:

‘Arab Spring’ still working its tortuous way to disaster. It’s going to get a lot worse before it gets any better (he said hopefully). And RIP JJ Cale

The usual story: Sunday shift finished, I am sitting in a pub supping my pint of cider and drawing on a cigar (which, I must swiftly add, I try as often as possible to buy when in Europe, where they are a damn sight cheaper – no plutcrat me, oh no). The choice of pubs is limited to two, in both of which I can sit outside and smoke and should it rain – not unknown in Britain – I am reasonably sheltered. Here, tonight, I am at the Scarsdale Arms. The other one I sometimes go to is the Devonshire Arms not – a rather hefty – stone’s throw away. In both the cider is excruciatingly expensive, but were I to try to find a cheaper pint, I should have to travel at least 10 miles, and for a cheaper pint of cider I can’t really be bothered.

Both pubs are patronised by loads of foreigners (a breed increasingly dear to a British heart in that, again increasingly, we have no choice in the matter). Foreigners, despite the goddam awful food traditionally served up in Britain, are attracted to our country. If you want to know why, you must ask one of them. Were I to be flippant – a useful ruse to say something you believe but want to disguise in case someone takes offence – is that you seem to get a better class of foreigner in the Scarsdale. That’s not why I come here, of course, and it’s just an observation. I am writing this because almost always I have an itch to write. The problem is that I rarely have much to write about, so I am bound to restrict myself to inconsequential rubbish. So here goes.

. . .

What the bloody hell is going on in Egypt? A few days ago an estimated 100 folk were gunned down in Cairo while demonstrating in support of the now deposed president Morsi. In case any you reading this entry have forgotten, Morsi was duly and democratically elected. There were no suggestions whatsoever that his election was in any way rigged. His supporters were apparently shot dead – and a great many more were wounded – by the army.

I don’t yet know, that is I haven’t yet heard, how the Egyptian army is explaining its actions and the deaths. In one of those excessively odd and, furthermore under the circumstances highly embarrassing, turns of fate, the army which killed all those folk – a more honest way of describing it would be ‘gunned down in cold blood’ – has the support – an ‘apparently’ is necessary here – of the liberal elite, the ‘burgeoning middle class’, all those folk who like to see themselves on the side of progress, literacy, democracy and the rest. So what is going on? The most recent piece of news I’ve heard is that the current prime minister has granted the army powers to arrest at will anyone they want to arrest. So that’s OK then. It’s all legal and above board.

Actually, I think what is going on is quite simple: the army had a nice thing going under Mubarak, but dumped him when the time seemed right. It then simply bided its time and they had more to lose by sticking up for their man. Then came the ‘popular uprising’ against Morsi, which suited the army’s purpose and cause rather well: they were able to steam in there, remove all those they wanted to remove, but do it all under the spurious cloak of ‘fighting for the people’ or whatever bullshit phrase they have chosen. Plus ca change...

Egypt seems to be split down the centre, which does not bode well for peace. Meanwhile, Turkey, which had its own problems a month or two ago, has rather gone quite (though in a stange sideshow Erdogan has threatened to launch a libel action against The Times here in Britain, claiming that – hold on a minute while I look this up – he was defamed in an open letter The Times published which criticised his handling of the recent protests). But most certainly the trouble there has not been settled.

In neighbouring Syria things are still going from bad to worse, with Assad’s forces now getting more of the upper hand. Obama is, true to form, humming and haahing about what America should do next. It would be easy to slag him off at this point, but he really does find himself between a rock and a hard place, and, I should imagine, his prime concerns are what domestic impact there is as a result of what he chooses to do. He is on record as laying down a ‘red line’ and says the U.S. will act if that red line is crossed. The red line was crossed when he had very good evidence that Assad’s forces had used chemical weapons.

Unfortunately, there is also evidence that the ‘rebels’ had also used chemical weapons and are generally behaving equally as brutally as Assad. Up a bit and to the left (if you are looking at a map of North Africa) the puported ‘success story’ which was Tunisia is beginning to look rather less successful now that a leading opposition leader has been killed. . . .

On more domestic matters, my children are unfortunately growing up. My daughter Elsie will turn 17 in nine days and her younger brother Wesley turned 14 in May. And it seems like only yesterday that they were babes in arms, keen to listen to a story in bed or accompany me ‘to town’ because in their then very limited world it was something of an adventure. Oh well.

I mention them because what with the fuck up the ‘Arab Spring’ is becoming I rather feel that the next few years will be hotter rather than colder and not just for the good folk living in North Africa and the Middle East. Earlier on today driving up from Cornwall I was listening to Desert Island Discs whose guest today was Mary Robinson, the former president of the Irish Republic and – in my view – and all-round good egg. One of the tracks she choose was Dylan’s The Times They Are A’Changing. Well, they certainly are. . . .

 JJ Cale — and without looking it up, I couldn’t even tell you his Christian name — has kicked the bucket and is now pushing up daisies. Cale was another of my faves, although again I can’t tell you when or how I first came across him and his music. It will have been in the Seventies, although if truth be told I didn’t really, really get to like it until I was older by at least 20 years. It’s like jazz and classical music: bit by bit you grow into it. Bit by bit the heroes of your younger years and the music they made begin to sound a little thin and you find yourself looking for something a little meatier. And despite his laid-back style Cale was meatier.

Orchard Dene and Lower Assendon revisited – I go on an unexpected and unplanned sentimental journey

Lower Assendon will mean very little to almost everyone reading this blog, unless you live in Henley-on-Thames or nearby – Watlingon, Bix, Fawley, Middle Assendon or, obviously, Lower Assendon. But it means something to me because it was where I grew up, by which I mean where I lived from the age of three to eight. It is at the end of the Fair Mile, the road leading out of Henley to Oxford, and is just beyond the junction where one road will take you to Watlington and the other onto Oxford, via Nettlebed and Nuffield.

It isn’t even a hamlet, let alone a village. It has no shop, and not even a proper pub. What was once a proper pub, The Golden Ball, is now a little more than a gastro-pub and a little less than a restaurant: if you eat there, you’ll not get away with spending at least, with drinks – who eats without drinking? - £40 a head and as you didn’t go on your own and are either a guest or a host, that can for many be something of a dent in your wallet, though not much of a dent for the good people of Henley and environs (which, I understand, is French for ‘the surrounding area’ - no slouch, me). I was there yesterday and could well have counted the houses there, but I didn’t, so all I can say is that Lower Assendon is made up of around ten or eleven houses, none near each other.

I got back from France on Friday afternoon, and as it seemed rather pointless to drive 240 miles home to Cornwall, only to drive the same 240 miles back up to London to get to work this morning, I decided to stay in London. I had planned to take Susan Wharton, Michael ‘Peter Simple’ wife, out for lunch, but just after she said yes, she rang back and told me she had looked at her diary and was promised to a party in Kent to celebrate the 90th birthday of a friend. It might sound like the bum’s rush, but I know Susan and it wasn’t.

So my next plan was to take Mark to The Golden Ball (it might just be the Golden Ball with a lower case ‘t’ – sub please check as all the really well-paid columnists are apt to say) for lunch. That was before we got there and discovered our local pub – local implies more than a hamlet, so if I tell you that when you are in Lower Assendon, it will take you more than three or four minutes to get to your neighbours house, you’ll understand why I say it is less than a hamlet – had transformed itself into what it is now. (If on the very, very rare occasion I am prepared to spend more than £40 a head on a meal, I shan’t do so in what was once a pub and should still be a pub.) So we had a pint of Brakspear’s bitter – the brewery as such no longer exists and has been bought out by some big brewing conglomerate or other though I have to say whoever brews Brakspear’s bitter has managed to keep it as good as ever – and after looking through the menu we decided we wouldn’t eat there. ‘Delightful Cornish scallops’ and ‘friendly, humanely slaughtered local pork’ really aren’t my thing, so knowing that the Rainbow Inn was a two-minute drive up the road, we ‘dined’ there. That wasn’t particularly brilliant, but substantially cheaper. Then we did what I had come to do which was to roam a little and to visit my haunts of – well, I must be honest – 60 years ago.

Nothing had changed, except that it all, naturally, looked rather smaller. I should say that I loved growing up there. There were about seven or eight of us who lived locally and we did all the things lads and lasses of six, seven and eight do. We built fires and tried to roast apples, which were, of course, inedible, rode our bikes here and there – I learnt to ride a bike on the gravel outside the Golden Ball (I’ve settle for the lower case ‘t’) – roamed the nearby woods and generally had a good time.

Here are the names of my companions in case any of them happen upon this blog: Ann Gibbons (of whom a little more later), Lindsay and Mandy Cooper, John Valentine, John Lovejoy, Richard Bryant, and myself and my older brother Ian. I had my first kiss with Mandy. She was about five and I was about six. The big house there was Orchard Dene, which consisted of the owner’s house, and around the back three flats, of which ours was by far the smallest. The owner was Jim Gibbons and his wife (whose name I can’t remember. Ann was their daughter.

We lived at 3 Orchard Dene, up a green, cast-iron set of stairs. Curious, I left my brother Mark in the car – which was his decision as he is somewhat ‘shy’ (odd for a man who is now 55) and didn’t want to come, and went to the big house and knocked on the door. A woman in her late 60s answered and I asked her whether she was Ann Gibbons. She was. I had similarly visited with my older brother Ian (who is now mentally ill) several years ago, but this time the visit was longer. We chatted for a while and were soon joined by her husband Peter, who asked me whether I would like to look inside 3 Orchard Dene. The present tenant, he said, was a very pleasant, very amenable man, who wouldn’t mind at all, and so I did. The tenant was on his way out to work, so he told us to let ourselves in.

The flat is small, just two bedrooms, one for Ian and myself and one for my parents. It has been thoroughly modernised, so the open fire in the living room and the coke burner in our room have gone and it is now centrally heated. What was once our larder now has a washing machine. The windows are now all modern. I spent some time chatting with Ann and her husband, and she reminded me of what I had forgotten and I reminded her of what she had forgotten. If you carry on up the lane, which leads to Bix, you’ll soon go passed what was once a diary farm run by – the name is not made up up – Farmer Smallbones. She said he taught her how to milk a cow. He didn’t teach me, but I do remember tumbling around in his hay loft and once, after learning the red was a colour bulls hated, parading up and down the other side of a gate to the yard which contained his bull, in a pair of red socks.

The Coopers lived in a small cottage at the end of the drive, but that has now been substantially gentrified and the owners run a B&B business. I have to say that this was not really a sentimental journey at all. I didn’t experience some kind of heaving in my breast or anything like that, but – the sun was out and it was a glorious day, I realised how lucky I was to have spent the early part of my childhood in such a lovely part of the country. Henley was not close for a young lad and although Ian and I went to primary school there, the Sacred Heart School, we had to catch a bus every morning to get there and then again at night to get home.

Ann has grandchildren who come and stay – they live in Bristol and so a visit to the countryside is always welcome – and these days they are not allowed to roam: it’s the increased traffic, she said, nothing else. But 60 years ago we roamed everywhere. In the holidays we had breakfast and then buggered off for the morning, came back home for lunch, and then buggered off again for the rest of the afternoon. In those days, as we all know, it was perpetual summer and I can’t, after all these years, remember one single drop of rain.

I now live in rural North Cornwall and am very grateful that my own two children, now 17 in two weeks and 14 a month or two ago, living next to their uncle’s beef farm and have several cousins, are also able to grow up in a very pleasant part of the country. It’s luck really. Many children cannot, but then children being children, until they are ten or eleven, most all things are an adventure whether you grow up in the country or a city.

Thank the Lord for small mercies.

PS ‘Lower Assendon’ – look it up on Google maps and switch to whatever the function is to allow you to go down the roads and byways.